This course will introduce you to some of the main areas of research in contemporary philosophy. Each module a different philosopher will talk you through some of the most important questions and issues in their area of expertise. We’ll begin by trying to understand what philosophy is – what are its characteristic aims and methods, and how does it differ from other subjects? Then we’ll spend the rest of the course gaining an introductory overview of several different areas of philosophy.
Topics you’ll learn about will include:
Epistemology, where we’ll consider what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it;
Philosophy of science, where we’ll investigate foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice;
Philosophy of Mind, where we’ll ask questions about what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained;
Political Philosophy, where we'll investigate whether we have an obligation to obey the law;
Moral Philosophy, where we’ll attempt to understand the nature of our moral judgements and reactions – whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences, and;
Metaphysics, where we’ll think through some fundamental conceptual questions about free will and the nature of reality.
The development of this MOOC has been led by the University of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre.
To accompany 'Introduction to Philosophy', we are pleased to announce a tie-in book from Routledge entitled 'Philosophy for Everyone'. This course companion to the 'Introduction to Philosophy' course was written by the Edinburgh Philosophy team expressly with the needs of MOOC students in mind. 'Philosophy for Everyone' contains clear and user-friendly chapters, chapter summaries, glossary, study questions, suggestions for further reading and guides to online resources. Please click "Start Here" and navigate to the "Optional Reading" page for more information.

AR

I found this course incredibly stimulating. A wonderfully structured introduction to European philosophy. All modules well presented. How lucky we are to have learning like this at our fingertips.

SD

Jul 04, 2019

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

This course is my first ever serious attempt to know Philosophy and it has been an excellent opportunity to know about different facets of modern Philosophy. I am curious to know more now! Thanks!

From the lesson

What is Knowledge? And Do We Have Any?

(Professor Duncan Pritchard) We know a lot of things – or, at least, we think we do. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge; what it is, and the ways we can come to have it. In this module, we’ll take a tour through some of the issues that arise in this branch of philosophy. In particular, we’ll think about what radical scepticism means for our claims to knowledge. How can we know something is the case if we’re unable to rule out possibilities that are clearly incompatible with it?

Taught By

Dr. Dave Ward

Professor Duncan Pritchard

Professor Michela Massimi

Full Professor

Dr. Suilin Lavelle

Lecturer in Philosophy

Dr. Matthew Chrisman

Reader in Philosophy

Dr. Allan Hazlett

Dr. Alasdair Richmond

Dr.

Guy Fletcher

Lecturer

Elinor Mason

Senior Lecturer

Transcript

So we saw in part one that knowledge requires true belief, that is, it requires getting it right, but we also saw that this [INAUDIBLE] actually requires a lot more then mere true belief. And the question then became, what do we need to add to true belief in order to know? Will it be one very influential account of, of what it takes to turn true belief into knowledge which has been and two quiet reason the dominant view in theory of knowledge. And this is known as the Classical Account of Knowledge. The Classical Account of Knowledge is been defended right back into antiquity, there's a version of this position in Plato for example. Until quite recently, it was just the standard view about the nature of knowledge. Here is what it says. It says knowledge is true belief. That is, knowledge requires truth. It requires belief. And then it also requires a third condition, which is usually called a justification condition. So what is the difference on this view between knowledge and mere true belief, merely getting it right? Well, the difference is that when one knows what has a justification for what one, one believes. Well, that means one has good reasons that one can offer in support of what one believes. So go back to our example from part one of the, the dura forming their beliefs through prejudice as opposed to the dura forming their belief. through carefully attending to the, the evidence as offered and thinking their way through that evidence and the directions they've been given. In the one case, the case the person believing through prejudice. Although, they get it right, although, they end up with a true belief, they can't offer good reasons in favor of what they believe. I mean, the best. They can say is that, that they believe what they do because of prejudice. But of course that's a terrible reason for believing a proposition in this case. Because aside from anything else, prejudice isn't a good way of forming true beliefs about whether or not someone's guilty. In contrast, the juror who carefully attends to the evidence and thinks things through. When asked why they believe what they do they can offer a justification for what they do. They can offer good reasons in support of their belief. So it seems then the difference between knowing as opposed to merely getting it right, is the possession of a justification. The possession of good reasons in support of why you believe what you do. And think again about those two intuitions that we encountered at the end of part one, the anti luck intuition and the ability intuition. Well, take the anti luck intuition first. That says that if you know then your true belief is not simply a matter of luck. Well if you've got good reasons in support of your belief, well then it isn't a matter of luck, is it? It's obviously if you've got good reasons, that means that you got to the truth because you formed your belief in the right kind of way. And similarly, the ability intuition, the claim that if you know then your true belief is down to your cognitive abilities in some important way. Well, if you can offer good reasons, well, where did those reasons come from if they weren't derived from you using your cognitive abilities? Just like. I, a juror who knows, uses that counter abilities to attend to the evidence, and think their way through the evidence, in order to form a correct judgement. So the classical account looks very plausible. The difference between knowing as opposed to merely getting it right, is that one has a justification. So the classical account was very dominant for a long time and that's because it just looks so incredibly plausible. Knowledge is justified, true belief. The view is often called a tripartite analysis of knowledge, because it has three parts to it. It's very simple. Truth, belief, justification. That's all that is required for knowledge. Unfortunately, the Classical Account of Knowledge, doesn't work. This came to light in the early 60s on account of a very famous paper general article by a man called Edmund Gettier. This paper is the stuff of legend and philosophies, just two and a half pages long. But it completely demolishes the Classical Account of Knowledge. What Gettier offered were cases where you have agents who have got true justified beliefs. So that is, they meet the conditions imposed by the Classical Account of Knowledge. And yet, they don't know. In particular, what's distinctive of Gettier cases is that the, the agent concerned doesn't know, because it's just a matter of luck that their beliefs are true. So these are what's called Gettier counterexamples. And we're going to look at some of these, these counterexamples, these cases, right now. Now, notice the examples that we're going to look at, they're not the original examples that Gettier offered. His examples are quite complicated. but we don't need to use Gettier's complicated examples to make the point that he wanted to make. There are much simpler examples that can make this point. The first one we're going to look at is the famous Stopped Clock Case. So this was first offered by Bertrand Russell, though at the time he didn't realize it was a Gettier case. He was, he used this example to illustrate a different point. But imagine though someone came downstairs one morning and they formed that belief about what time is by looking at the clock on their wall. And let's suppose that this clock has been very reliable up until now, there's no reason to think there's anything wrong with it today. The time it's telling looks plausible. It's roughly correct and so on, you know. So you know it's roughly what time it is in the morning and what the clock says pretty much corresponds to that. So you've formed a belief about what time it is by looking at the clock. And now, let's stipulate that the belief that you've formed is true, so you formed a true belief by looking at this clock. Now, the belief is clearly justified, because you've got good reasons for believing what you do. the clock is a reliable clock. You've got independent reasons for thinking that what the clock says is broadly correct. You've no reason to doubt that the, the clock is giving you a wrong answer, and so on. So you got a justified true belief. Here's the twist in the tale, though. Suppose the clock has stopped, suppose it stopped 12 hours ago, or 24 hours ago, if you're using a 24 hour clock. So, what you're looking at right now is a stop clock. However, you just so happened to be looking at the stop clock in the one time in the day. You know, two times in the day, depending on whether it's a 12 or 24 hour clock, when it's showing you the correct time. Here's the crux of the matter. You can't come to know what the time is by looking at a stopped clock. Even if you happen to get a true belief about what the time is. As has happened in this case. And part of the reason for that is that getting a true belief about the time by looking at a stopped clock, it's just too lucky. If you've got a true belief it's just a matter of luck that your belief is true. And so, we're offending here against the anti luck intuition on knowledge in which we saw in part one. So it seems what we've got is justified true belief, so we got a belief that satisfies the condition of the Classical Account of Knowledge, and yet we haven't got knowledge. And in particular, we haven't got knowledge because we've got a true belief where it's just a matter of luck that the belief is true. Here's a second Gettier's star case, this time due to Roderick Chisholm, who was a, who was an American philosopher. Imagine a farmer looking into a field and seeing in clear daylight and so forth. What looks very much like a sheep in the field. And so on this basis they form the belief that there's a sheep in the field. And if this belief is true there really is a sheep in the field, so we've got a true belief. And indeed on any plausible conception of what justification unfolds they got a justified true belief there's a sheep in the field. I mean after all normally that you can see something in clear daylight, which looks like something which your very familiar with. In this case, a sheep, if you're a farmer. That's a good reason that walking off, or good justification, for why one has the belief that one does. So the farmer it seems has a justified true belief. Here's the crocks though. Imagine we set the case up so that what the farmer's looking at is not a real sheep. What they're looking at is some sheep-shaped object. Let's suppose it's a big hairy dog, or a, a sheep-shaped rock, or something like that, so something that looks like a sheep, but which isn't in fact a sheep. But now imagine that there really is a sheep in the field, it's just it's hidden from view behind the thing that the farmer's looking at. So what the farmer's got is a, is a true belief and a justified true belief but intuitively doesn't know that there's a sheep in the field because what he's looking at isn't a sheep. And again, the moral of this seems to be he doesn't know because his belief is just lucky. He's got a true belief that could very easily have been false. And the reason why it could very easily have been false is because what he's looking at isn't a sheep, but just a sheep-shaped object. If there hadn't by chance, been a sheep hidden from view behind the sheep-shaped object he's looking at, then his belief wouldn't have been true. So again, we've got a Gettier case. Justified, true belief which doesn't amount to knowledge. And it doesn't amount to knowledge because even though the belief is true and justified. It's just a matter of luck if that belief is true. Now one way of responding to Gettier cases, is to try and criticize the cases themselves. So for example, in the sheep cases you might say, well is the father really believing that there's a sheep in the field as to opposed to believe in, that thing out there that they looking at is a sheep. I mean if that were true, then this would make a big difference. Because of course, the belief that that thing over there is a sheep. Well that's a false belief, as opposed to the belief of the sheep in the field. And in general with Gettier cases, there's usually a bit of fancy footwork that won't can do, to try to get out of the problem by thinking about the case. But it ought to be clear that although this might work for particular kinds of cases, it's not in general going to be a good way of dealing with Gettier cases and with the problem that they pose. The point is that there is a general formula for creating Gettier cases. So, in so far as one can find a problem with a particular kind of case, then we just go back to the formula and create a new one. And so if you want to deal with the Gettier problem, we've go to engage with these cases on masse and not simply deal with them peacemeal, one by one. So, what's the formula for creating Gettier cases. Well, it basically has two steps. The first step is to have an agent form your beliefs in such a way where the belief would normally be false. So, think about the the farmer forming a belief by looking at a sheep shaped object, rather than the sheep. So they form a belief about where there's a sheep in the field by looking at something which isn't a sheep. Or think about the agent looking at a stopped clock in order to find out what the time is. So, in both cases, you've got informing that belief in such a way, they would normally end up with a false belief. But now we just adapt the case so that, as it happens, they end up with a true belief. So, in the stopped clock case, we just stipulate that they, they happen to look at the clock at the one time of the day when it's showing the right time. In the sheep case, we stipulate that they just happen to be looking at a sheep shaped object which has a genuine sheep hidden from view behind. So with that formula in play, we can construct Gettier cases at will. And that means that the Gettier problem is, is quite a serious problem. It's not a problem that can be dealt with simply by focusing on the details of each particular case. Rather, one needs to find a, a very general way of excluding Gettier cases in one's theory of knowledge. So in the immediate aftermath of Gettier's article, people thought that maybe there would be a simple solution to this. Or maybe, for example, all we need to do is to take the classical account, the tripartite account, the three part account and just add a fourth part onto it. Add some fourth condition which gets around the Gettier problem. But it soon became clear that, this is, it's not as straightforward as it looked. In fact, it's, I think pretty much widely accepted now, that there is no straightforward way of simply adding extra condition onto the classical account, to fix the problem caused by Gettier cases. Now, I can't go through all the different proposals people have made in this regard. So what I want to do is pick out one Proposal, which might on the face of it look very plausible, and try and give you a sense of some of the problems that this proposal faces. So here's, here's a, a, a view that someone called, Keith Lehrer has put forward. And various other people have tried to defend versions of this. The thought is that we need to add to the classical account a fourth condition, which says that your belief is not based on any false assumptions or false lemmas. So a lemma is just a for our purposes, we can just think of as an assumption. So this is called the no false lemmas view. So knowledge becomes justified, true belief. Where the true belief is not based on any false lemmas. So the no false lemmas account looks quite plausible on the face of it. You just add this extra condition of knowledge, and thereby you exclude the Gettier cases. The devil, however, as so often in philosophy, is in the details. In particular, we need to be given a principled way of understanding what an assumption is, what a lemma is, in this context. And that's actually quite a tricky thing to do. In particular, we don't want to [UNKNOWN] a way of thinking about assumptions about lemmas which is so broad, that it excludes even genuine cases of knowledge as being knowledge. But equally, we don't want it so narrow that it fails to exclude Gettier cases as cases of knowledge. So, consider for example, a very narrow way of thinking about assumptions. We might think that an assumption is something that one actually thinks about as an assumption, informing one's beliefs. So, in the stopped clock case, for example, we might imagine that informing the belief about the time by consulting the clock, our agent actually thinks themselves. I, I'm assuming here that the clock is working or something like that. Of course the problem with that is that it seems psychologically implausible. You know, when we form beliefs about the time we seem quite properly to just simply directly form the belief. We don't think to ourselves, you know, it sort of lists in our minds what assumptions we're making in making, in forming beliefs that we do. [NOISE] And remember, the subject has no reason to think that the clock isn't working, so they might, they might go through this process if they've got a reason for thinking the clock isn't working. But insofar as the, what they're faced with is a working clock, it seems the right thing to do is just form your belief about the time. So this conception is a narrow conception of what an assumption is, doesn't seem to do the work that it's meant to do, it doesn't exclude Gettier cases. But now imagine a broad conception of assumptions. Suppose we think an assumption is just some false belief that one has which is germane in some way to to the, the target belief that you're forming in the Gettier case. [INAUDIBLE] And which is false. So here we get the right result in the Gettier cases. So, it probably is true, in the case of the stopped clock for example, that our subject believes, falsely as it turns out, that the clock is working. So, they're not consciously thinking about this at the time, but they do on some level believe it. Here's the tricky thing though, if you think of assumptions in this very broad way. Then the dangers is that lots of genuine case of knowledge are now going to be excluded. After all, of all the many things that we believe at any one time some of those things that we believe will be false. So who is to say these false things that you believe which may be very peripheral. To the kinds of beliefs that you're forming right now. How is to say that they, in virtue of being false, shouldn't deprive you of knowledge of the things you're believing right now. So what is it that says that there are not somehow assumptions in play, in some implicit way, in your forming your beliefs. So that's a tricky thing. We have to be given some principal way of understanding what an assumption is, such that it generates the right kind of result. And that's actually notoriously difficult to do. So the Gettier problem is much more difficult to resolve then it may at first appear. In particular, it's not amenable to a quick fix. Now, there is two sorts of very general questions, issues that are raised by the Gettier problem. The first is whether or not justification is even necessary for knowledge. So, the Gettier problem demonstrates that justification isn't sufficient with true belief or knowledge. That, you need, at the very least, something else. But, of course, one might, at this point, wonder whether, whether maybe justification is the problem here. Maybe, rather than trying to find some extra condition to add to justification. [NOISE] Maybe we should th, rethink what we require of knowledge over and above mere true belief. Maybe we don't need justification at all. Maybe some other kind of condition is what we should add to knowledge. [NOISE] And this is one possibility that epistemologists have explored in the aftermath of the, of Gettier's famous article. [NOISE] And the second problem which might be related to the first is the issue of, well. If the justification condition doesn't eliminate knowledge undermining luck, right. If the justification by itself can't respond to our intuition about the, what we call part one, the anti-luck intuition. Can't explain how, when we know we've got true belief that it's down to luck, well then, what kind of condition would do that? So it seems we got a basic demand that we lay down on the theory of knowledge that we want to account to how it is when we know that our true belief isn't down to luck. Gettier cases show that one can have justified true beliefs that are down to luck and so the question that we comes to, what kind of condition must we add to knowledge. In order to be confident that we've got cognitive success, true belief that isn't down to luck. And that, that's quite a puzzle. We thought justification would do that, it doesn't do that. So what kind of condition would do that? Okay, here are conclusions from part two. First thing we looked at was the, the Classical Account of Knowledge. This is the idea that when one knows one has a true belief, one gets it right, and in addition one has a justification. That is, one can offer good reasons in support of what one believes. We saw this bit of very intellectual theory of knowledge. But we also saw that it, it's not tenable on closer inspection. And the reason why it's not tenable is down to Gettier cases or the Gettier problem in general. So Gettier cases are cases of justified true belief where you don't have knowledge, and the reason why you don't have knowledge is that it's just a matter of luck that your belief is true in these cases. And then finally, we saw that the, the Gettier problem isn't amenable to an obvious solution. to illustrate this, we looked briefly at the, No False Lemmas Account of Knowledge which tries to simply add a fourth condition onto the theory of knowledge, onto the classical account, in order to solve Gettier problems. And we saw that the, the devil lay in the details there. It was very difficult to get this formula formulation of this view such that it, it did the work that it was meant to do. So we're left in with fundamental problem. The problem is what is knowledge? If it's not justified true belief, then in saying it isn't, that's the more of the [INAUDIBLE] cases. Well then, what is knowledge?

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